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Apartments in Paris

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part 1 Art, Paris, porn and the web.

part 2
Looks at art and porn in the context of still imagery and film.

part 3 asks: is sex in art cultural satisfaction?

letter from paris : : matthew rose

francis picabia, 'singulier idéal' : : joseph nechvatal

très rare tableau sur la terre, 1915
Huile et collage sur carton, bois doré et argenté, 113 x 86,5 cm Venice, The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation © Venice, The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
"Francis Picabia, Singulier idéal" at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville Paris is the first presentation of Picabia's oeuvre in Paris since the Grand Palais retrospective of 1976. Picabia (1879-1953), of course, was principally a jocund painter -- but he also was a poet (in 1918 he published a book of poems and drawings entitled Poèmes et dessins de la fille née sans mère ["Poems and drawings of the girl born without a mother")], pamphleteer, enfant terrible, and avant-garde publisher of such reviews as 391 and Cannibale.
Born François Marie Martinez Picabia, he became friendly with Guillaume Apollinaire and Marcel Duchamp, associated with the artistic group which met in Jacques Villon's studio in the village of Puteaux in 1911-12, and later (1918) was allied with the Zürich Dadaists, specifically associating with Tristan Tzara. 1915 saw the emergence of Picabia's machinist period when he discovered industrial design as a pictorial source. See for example the painting in the show from The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice called Très rare tableau sur la terre ("Very Rare Painting on the Earth," 1915).
Picabia eventually blended this machinist aesthetic with representations of the human body, creating his significant auto-erotic (and dea ex machina) mechanomorphic period -- the strongest work in the show. By this artistic amalgamation, prevailing cyber-sensations were admirably hypothesized in advance. Indeed, one immediately thinks of the contemporary paintings of Gerwald Rockenschaub, with their hard-edge metallic geometric renderings of computer scenes and/or creatures.
Painting in a dry but radiant, even combustible, style (for example in the painting Parade amoureuse (Love Parade, 1918), Picabia raises the issue of a bottomless contemporary dilemma -- the interface/dialectic between body and machine. If in cyberspace our ontologies are adrift vis-a-vis how personal subjectivity was once understood, Picabia's central idea in Parade amoureuse leads us right up to that slippery elocution between mechanical embodiment and subjectivity -- between physical embodiment and machine assistance/circumvention -- where we viractually teeter this very moment. Undoubtedly, with the Dada mechanomorphic period Picabia illustrates nicely our spatialized digital paradigm by mixing implied bodies with mechanical schematics. Here, the cyborg body receives an ecstatic capability through the repetitions of machinery. Of course what 'disappears' or is 'disembodied' is not the material body but an abstract notion of the self. This de-presentation is followed by a reconstruction of embodiment into what is now commonly known as the posthuman condition.
But after viewing at length Francis Picabia, Singulier idéal one wonders: should belief in the body's semi-obsolescence as depicted in the mechanomorphic period be theorized as an expression of narcissistic cybernetic post-flesh -- or, rather, as a refusal of technocratic control in that the intractability of the body would no longer be so central an issue? Still not sure, but what we recognize in his mechanomorphic paintings is that by entering into the repetitions of the machine the subject may fuse into gyrating repeats in a complex and cryptic way. Here flesh is no longer the grounds for subjectivity. At the same time the subject is licensed through a décadent extension into self-motorized possession as the subject achieves disembodiment within high technology. Persuasive simulated worlds can exist for us as 'real' because we can perceive them through the techno-apparatus of our body spliced into the cybernetic circuit. I understand this anti-materialist lurch towards liberty in terms of self-transcendent race and gender collapse.
Even without citing the efficacious theoretical influence of Donna Haraway's cyborg-theory, the depictions of post-flesh in Parade amoureuse and Magneto anglaise (English Magnet, 1922) seem to courageously facilitate an inebriated subjectivity by constructing an imaginative space of accommodation for an intensely onanistic existence. Here flamboyant self-reliant relationships between the protoplasmic body-image and mechanic spatial conceptions are visualized as self-prosthesis. This makes Picabia's mechanomorphic avant-garde period impressive in philosophical terms, as fairly recent contemporary thought has been concerned with the poststructuralist deliberation on the notion of the subject in order to question -- and unlasso -- its traditionally privileged epistemological status. Particularly in respect to the techno realm there has been a sustained effort to question the role of the subject as the intending and knowing autonomous creator -- as coherent originator. Again, Picabia's mechanomorphic period informs us here. In fact, for me, this period of his work has become emblematic of this rigorously scrutinizing of the subject which Jacques Derrida has described as 'logocentrism': the once held distinctions between subjectivity and objectivity; between public and private; between fantasy and reality; and between the unconscious and the conscious realm.
Today we understand that these distinctions are breaking down under the pressure of our speeding and omnipresent computer communications network technologies. We are now part of an automated technologically hallucinogenic culture that functions along the lines of a dream, free from some of the classical strictures of time and space; free from some of our traditional earthly limits which have been broken down by the instantaneous nature of electronic communications (particularly with its crown jewel, immersive virtual reality). The modernist existential concept of the singular individual has been supplanted by the electronic-aided individual, in a way liberating the body from linear time and vaporously placing it in a technologically stored eternity (simulacrum-hyperreality). This quality of phantasmagorical and perverse displacement has for some signified a tightening spiral which formulates a new vision of existence -- a vision which Jean Baudrillard has called 'pornographic'.
In Picabia's mechanomorphic period the body -- through a dismemberment of traditional narrative subjectivity - is undone by a proscribed clamor it cannot contain. Here trans-crystalline notions of the self reflect the formational effect of webbed high technology. Here the kind of top-down logic (with which we are all too familiar) is opposed by an intricate interplay of complexity. There is no Debordian spectacular society where all people are advertisements for the status quo portrayed here. Rather, Picabia traces the tensions between human narrative and the mechanical spectacle. Thus Picabia is the mythic oracle pointing us to an indeterminate but artistic resolution between the two competing categories of being today -- the mechanic and the organic. For Picabia, mechanical penetration achieves and performs direct bodily engagement. The subject's existence is enhanced by his/her disappearance into technology-induced realms. The body's dissolution may be empowering then.
But is Picabia just being Dada disingenuous by proposing this posture? Given the period's death, or explanation of, the mythic Father/God -- alongside the enduring wish of Western modern thought to trundle exterior reality -- I think not. Here, in the mechanomorphic operation, the paradoxically simultaneous experiences of death and immortality that is fundamental to Western religious practice is laid bare. Having explained God, Picabia creates a post-flesh art by virtue of a relocation of body/machine/consciousness. Actually, Picabia seems to address here how technological consciousness infects people like a virus. That such a semi-programmed Dada philosophy engages our contemporary fixations today is not remarkable. All told, Picabia remains quite formidable in his versatile span; a span which leaves many current cultural producers looking dismally ethnocentric.

Joseph Nechvatal is an artist who has worked with ubiquitous electronic visual information and computer-robotics since 1986. His computer-robotic assisted paintings and custom computer virus software are shown regularly in galleries and museums internationally. Dr. Nechvatal earned his Ph.D. in the philosophy of art and new technology at The Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts. Email: joseph_nechvatal@hotmail.com. Web site: http://www.nechvatal.net
"Francis Picabia, Singulier idéal" Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville Paris
November 16th, 2002 - March 16th
2003 11, Ave du President Wilson
Open: 10 a.m.-5.30 p.m. / Saturday, Sunday: 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Closed: Monday, bank holidays
Metro : Alma-Marceau Telephone # 01 53 67 40 00

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